Summer 2007

INTRO TEXT “it’s easy to say, ‘Give me this, give me that,’” said Rep. Joseph Wagner, the Chicopee Democrat who co-chairs the Joint Committee on Transportation, during testimony on a commuter rail proposal this spring. “It’s not so easy to finance it.” That sums up the South Coast rail conundrum. But Gov. Deval Patrick says(...)

Ansin has made mill redevelopmenthis passion—and the revival ofstruggling Bay State cities itshoped-for byproduct. if the walls of the Wood Worsted Mill in Lawrence could talk, they would tell the stories of thousands of immigrant laborers who landed at its looms, hoping to scratch out a better life along the banks of the Merrimack River.(...)

Illustration by Greg Morgan a small group of Hull residents have roused themselves early on a Saturday morning for a presentation at the local senior center on the feasibility of getting drinking water from the sea. In a sunlit meeting room where a portrait of President John F. Kennedy sits on top of an upright(...)

On a Wednesday afternoon in late April, I went to the John W. McCormack state office building, a pillar of bureaucracy a half-block east of the State House, and found my way into a basement-level meeting room. There, 11 members of the Health Care Quality and Cost Council sat in a U-formation in the windowless(...)

UPDATE: For more recent foreclosure data, go to the Head Count in our Winter 2009 issue. home foreclosures in Massachusetts continued to climb this spring—up 40 percent in May compared with the same period last year, according to the Warren Group. The map based on the number of foreclosures during the 180-day period ending on(...)

Photograph by Russ Campbell on behalf of the MassINC board of directors, we are delighted to introduce readers to Gregory Torres, the new president of MassINC and publisher of CommonWealth magazine. Greg brings an uncommon set of qualifications that make him the right person to lead MassINC into its second decade. MassINC is now one(...)

Pay up—and shut up? Under one school of thought, second-homeowners are a major asset to the Massachusetts economy. They pay property taxes, constantly renovate those second homes, and buy up all the heirloom tomatoes and artisanal goat cheese the natives can crank out, without requiring much in return in the way of services. But there’s(...)

the specter of little toothpicks twirling on the horizon of Nantucket Sound is causing fits among the political elites who make summer a verb on Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard, and Nantucket. On overcast days, they wouldn’t see anything but the soft line separating water from sky. But on sunny days . . . Those toothpicks(...)

nowadays we expect to see actors, athletes, and other celebrities used to sell products. Things were much different a century ago, when goods got their props from doe-eyed, rosy-cheeked boys and girls. Images of cherubic-looking youngsters were used to advertise things any kid would want, of course, like bicycles, chocolates, and lace-up shoes. They were(...)

buildings matter. They temper our mood, refract our ambitions and sensibilities. At their best, they might inspire us to behave better. “We want [buildings] to shelter us,” says essayist Alain de Botton in The Architecture of Happiness (Pantheon, 2006). “And we want them to speak to us—to speak to us of whatever we find important(...)